


Slightly Creepy Boy

by tjs_whatnot



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Ficlet, Friendship, Hogwarts Era, Second War with Voldemort, The Quidditch Pitch: From Diagon Alley to Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-01
Updated: 2009-01-01
Packaged: 2018-10-27 08:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10805079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjs_whatnot/pseuds/tjs_whatnot
Summary: While Harry struggles with what he learned of his father in Occulemency, he finds a mysterious boy who is just what he needs.





	Slightly Creepy Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Annie, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Quidditch Pitch](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Quidditch_Pitch), which went offline in 2015 when the hosting expired, at a time I was not able to renew it. I contacted Open Doors, hoping to preserve the archive using an old backup, and began importing these works as an Open Doors-approved project in April 2017. Open Doors e-mailed all authors about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [The Quidditch Pitch collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thequidditchpitch/profile).
> 
>  **Author's notes:** In the credits for Order of the Phoenix film, there is a character in the DA with the name "Slightly Creepy Boy" and for some reason, I'm fascinated by this.

“Hey,” Harry called out at the end of the DA meeting.

 

 

Just his luck everyone turned around except the one whose attention he was trying to get. The one whose name he didn’t know. How was it possible that he had been working side by side with this group of students and yet, he couldn’t remember ever meeting this particular boy?

 

 

“What are you lookin’ at?” Ron asked.

 

 

“What is the bloke’s name?” Harry asked in a whisper.

 

 

Ron looked in the direction Harry was looking. “Don’t know. He’s in Ravenclaw.”

 

 

Harry looked at him sardonically, “Gee, thanks. What gave him away? The tie?”

 

 

Everyone started drifting out of the room, the mysterious boy hung back, slinking about a dozen steps behind everyone else. He had long, dark hair and he had a mistreated, sensitive-soul look about him. He could have been the same age as Harry but he could have also been older or younger.

 

 

There was no one waiting for him to catch up with them as they walked out of the room. He had his eyes on the floor in front of him, so didn’t notice and jumped when Harry said, “Hi.”

 

 

“H---ello.”  The boy said, looking up and flushing. There was something in his look that reminded Harry of something and yet he couldn’t place exactly what.

 

 

“What’s your name again?” Harry asked.

 

 

“Sean, Sean Colin Brayton.”

 

 

“Sean. How are you enjoying the DA?”

 

 

Sean looked around, making sure he was the one being addressed. “Fine. I like learning how to defend myself, to stand up for myself.”

 

 

It was then that he recognized the look. He had seen it only days before looking into the mind of a man who he had hated; into the past of a man whose painful childhood he could totally relate to, no matter what the man thought. He had seen that look of desperate longing and of a world beating you down.

 

 

Harry walked him out of the room. “Which curse do you like best?”

 

 

“Cave Inimicum,” Sean said, sounding shocked with himself for admitting it.

 

 

“The spell to keep enemies away? Yeah, I like that one too.”

 

 

“I bet,” Sean said.

 

 

Harry was too busy wondering who this boy’s enemies were to respond right away. He did want to keep him talking though, so he continued to ask him questions as they made their way to the Great Hall for dinner.

 

 

“Why don’t you join me?” Harry said.

 

 

“What?” Sean gulped.

 

 

“Yeah, I’ll introduce you to my friends. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.”

 

 

***

 

 

The next few weeks Harry spent a lot of time with Sean. He tried once to explain it to Ron, but it was too hard. He had never told him about his father and how he taunted a lonely, mistreated boy and how that boy had turned out. He couldn’t explain about how he understood about Sean’s abusive family and how he sometimes had wished that he didn’t exist.

 

 

Ron was a great friend, but he wouldn’t understand what Sean understood. And if being this boy’s only friend would somehow make his life better, make it different, then it really wasn’t that hard of a thing to do.

 

 

Besides he liked Sean. Once you got him talking, he was funny and self-deprecating in a good way. He saw things with an oddly skewed lense that was fun and enlightening together.

 

 

“People are starting to wonder.” Ron told him one night after he got back to the dorm. He and Sean had been out with Luna watching Thestrals flying over the lake.

 

 

“Wonder about what?”

 

 

“About the two of you. Why you spend so much time together, what you are doing together all the time.”

 

 

“You can’t be serious!”

 

 

“Well, it’s weird.”

 

 

“You and I spend all our time together, do people talk?”

 

 

Ron looked shifty. “Yeah, I think they do.”

 

 

“People need to get a hobby!” Harry said.

 

 

***

 

 

If Ron had have kept his mouth shut the idea of it, the forbidden of it wouldn’t have crept in and wouldn’t have festered in every gesture, every shared look every moment of Harry’s time with Sean. But he had, and now Harry did. He saw the way the boy’s soulful eyes watched him throughout DA meetings, he saw the way his face lit up when Harry walked towards him in the hall.

 

 

Then Harry began to notice the way his own heart beat faster when he saw Sean across the hall, when they walked together and talked.

 

 

_It was just because of what Ron had said_ , he thought at first.

 

 

_It was just because the boy intrigued him_ , he thought after that.

 

 

_It was just because the boy seemed to really_ need _him_ , he finally thought.

 

 

It was true. Harry had never felt as needed as he felt when he was with Sean. The boy had no other friends and Harry couldn’t understand why. He asked Sean one night.

 

 

“You know what they call me don’t you?” Sean asked.

 

 

“No, what?”

 

 

“With the initials of my name, S.C.B. they call me, Slightly Creepy Boy,” he said it as fact, no hurt, no hard feelings.

 

 

Harry swallowed. “I don’t think you’re creepy.”

 

 

Sean smiled. “Not at all?”

 

 

Harry smiled too. “Well maybe slightly.”

 

 

“Yeah, only slightly, right, I guess it could be worse,” Sean said.

 

 

“But why do they think you’re creepy? Because you’re shy? So what. Because you spend a lot of time alone, reading? That should be completely acceptable behavior for a Ravenclaw, right?”

 

 

The boy smiled sadly. “No, it’s for none of those reasons. It’s because I change.”

 

 

“What do you mean you change? Change what?”

 

 

Struggling, as if trying to figure the best way to express something, Sean said, “I _become._ I shouldn’t be telling you this, not yet. But I think you are ready to hear it.”

 

 

Harry’s hair stood up on his arms and the back of his neck. The boy suddenly did change; he went from slightly to full on creepy. “Tell me what?”

 

 

“I am an _Essentia_. You’ve heard of Metamorphmagus right?”

 

 

Harry nodded his head, wondering what Tonks’ particular talents had to do with any of this.

 

 

“Well it’s a bit like that, but instead of changing our outward appearance, we can change our Essence; what people see on the inside. I become what people need me to be.”

 

 

Harry didn’t understand. He didn’t need anything from the boy, if anything, he was here because the boy needed him.

 

 

“You don’t know what it is you need do you?” Sean said, as if penetrating Harry’s mind. Harry had enough of that lately to know that this was a similar sensation, but different.

 

 

“No, I don’t.”

 

 

“Haven’t you been wondering lately if you were like your father? If given the same circumstances if you would have taunted a misunderstood boy? Would have taken the chance to look past the _creepy_?”

 

 

Harry swallowed but couldn’t form words yet. Which was good, as Sean was not done probing his inner thoughts.

 

 

“And haven’t you thought about that quiet, odd boy and wondered about yourself? You see him in your mind and you wonder if you hadn’t meet Ron on the train, hadn’t allowed yourself to be sorted into Gryffindor, thereby forming the relationships you did, if you wouldn’t have been like that boy. I see that. I see that you needed to know if there was any hope of redemption for that boy; if there would have been any redemption for you.”

 

 

“And is there?” Harry whispered.

 

 

“You know the answer to that. My being here talking to you is all the proof you need.”

 

 


End file.
